


Born To Be Wild

by WonderstruckGuardian



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awesome Donna Noble, BAMF Rose Tyler, Dimension-Hopping Rose Tyler, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, I don't own anything from Meow Wolf, Memory Alteration, Meow Wolf, Mystery, Reunions, Telepathy, Temporal Anomalies, The Doctor Loves Rose Tyler, The House of Eternal Return, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26110420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderstruckGuardian/pseuds/WonderstruckGuardian
Summary: There is a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico with strange secrets buried within its walls, secrets that could lead to the collapse of the Multiverse. An unusual family has gone missing, yet their voices can be heard crying out for help across space and time. Who will answer the call? The Doctor and Donna Noble, of course. And, coincidentally, a dimension-hopping Rose Tyler.(In other words, Donna really just wants to get some sleep, but first she has to reunite  two lovestruck idiots and save the entire Multiverse...possibly with the help of a dragon, and maybe an army of mathematically-inclined flamingos.)
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35





	1. The Stuff of Legend, or To Whom It May Concern

**Author's Note:**

> All characters and references from the interactive art experience "The House of Eternal Return" in Santa Fe, NM belong to the artists at Meow Wolf. I'm just borrowing a bunch of their awesome material and mixing it timey-wimey style with Doctor Who. If you would like to get a better visual sense of "The House of Eternal Return", feel free to check out the Meow Wolf website, or look up images of some of the house's rooms.
> 
> I had a lot of fun writing this, and I hope you enjoy reading it. It's my first work in the DW fandom, and I'm new-ish to the fandom over all.

**From: Charter Agent 35**

**Reporting From: The Doctor’s TARDIS**

**Local Time: --/--/----**

**Subject: The Truth**

To Whom It May Concern:

I am going to hide this letter somewhere in the Selig family’s house—currently kept under temporal stasis in Santa Fe, New Mexico—so that recent events can be recorded truthfully. I'm also doing this in case my upcoming actions result in my demise, indefinite exile to the robot pits, or any other sort of failure to complete my mission. I should specify that by mission, I mean my personal mission, not the one assigned to me by the Charter.

Whoever finds this, you should know that I have seen the stuff of legend with my own eyes, and now I know the truth. The Charter is wrong, so very, very wrong. They are trying to fight something that cannot be fought; it should not be fought, and I am not afraid to say it anymore. The Charter is wrong about the entity known as the Anomaly.

I know now that She (the Anomaly) is far greater, and far more beautiful in every way than any of us at the Charter could have imagined.

In the two billion years the Charter has existed, we have archived many legends from planets influenced by the Anomaly. All of the legends, every SINGLE one, state in some way or another that She is the beginning and end of all things, the ultimate creative and destructive force.

She is part of what humans on Earth call the Big Bang, and the End of Days. She is the Howling Wolf, and the endless Song of Time. Many stories even go as far as to say She created Herself.

She is a paradox. The ultimate paradox, because you cannot create yourself.

She can.

She has, and She will. To my knowledge, the Anomaly is the only “stable paradox” in this or any universe. Most importantly, She is not a threat — regardless of what the Charter insists.

As you may already know — and if you are a member of the Charter, please consider this my formal resignation — the Charter was founded out of a united coalition of planets in order to contain and control the chaotic creative powers of the Anomaly. We were terrified that because She could (has, and will) create anything and everything in existence, She would continue to create so many things that She would throw all of time and space out of balance, along with all of the barely stable laws governing the universe(s).

While the Anomaly does create immeasurable new things, She also destroys the old to keep the Multiverse in balance. She would not destroy everything She had worked to create, nor will She let it all be controlled by the Charter’s need for Perfect Order.

“Order Perfects Creation.” That’s our motto. Hah. 

I remember the first moment in my agent training that I was shown the Anomaly in her most primal form. All new recruits are taken outside the Charter Headquarters on their first day to see the Anomaly up close. 

It’s hard to describe the experience. She electrifies you, terrifies you, inspires you, makes your hair (if you have it) stand on end and leaves you feeling vast and tiny all at once. As new recruits stand in Her presence, in the presence of this conscious, glowing, nebulous sphere of pure energy contained within a huge, transparent dome, we are told the story of the founding of the Charter.

A few million years after ‘discovering’ the Anomaly near a planet deep within one of the oldest elliptical galaxies in our primary universe, our great founders trapped Her inside an impenetrable dome and built our headquarters within direct sight of it. We forced Her to agree to _our_ terms.

New Charter recruits are told that She is our enemy, and it is our sacred duty to stop Her from escaping from Her prison at all costs.

I believed all of that, until now.

This brings me to another thing the Charter is wrong about. We trapped what we thought was the only “true” physical manifestation of the Anomaly in our universe. We were wrong.

The primal, nebulous manifestation of the Anomaly at Charter headquarters is simply Her most powerfully _creative_ form. There are others out there. At this very moment, I’m in the Doctor’s TARDIS with another form of Her, this one in a human body. The Charter knows her as Bad Wolf.

The form of the Anomaly at the Charter headquarters occasionally sends bursts of Her energy to the far corners of the universe. The energy creates new life, new ideas, and new beginnings far beyond the Charter’s ability to contain them. The prime directive of every Charter official is to contain these rogue bursts of Anomaly energy before they can take hold on a distant planet or in an individual being.

The Charter does not always act fast enough to contain Her—and now I say thank the Anomaly for that.

Sometimes, She turns uninhabitable planets into lush, live-giving sanctuaries overnight. Other times, on rare occasions, an individual who the Anomaly has chosen will suddenly wake up one morning with Her power, essentially the powers of the gods, inside them. At the Charter, we call these individuals “children of the Anomaly”. 

Imagine a 39-year-old woman on Earth who was born with the ability to perceive every possible variation in the known multiverse of even the simplest of objects. She paints what she sees, and every painting looks like an abstract jumble of colors unless you see it the way she does: like a million-faceted diamond, thousands of universes and timelines intersecting around a single still-life of a fruit bowl.

Imagine that this painter had a twin brother who, through a series of disastrous events, gained the ability to create whole new universes with one wave of his hand as a child. Then he grew up and started wreaking havoc on the very fabric of the cosmos with every new universe created, stolen, or destroyed.

Imagine that these two siblings had a father, a war veteran who just happened to meet another child of the Anomaly during his days as a soldier. Imagine that this child of the Anomaly taught the father how to harness sonic energy to heal the wounded. Imagine that after the war, the father learned to use this same energy to secretly communicate with other children of the Anomaly on Earth. Imagine that that is how he met his wife.

Now imagine that the veteran’s wife had no known background, no birth record, no known family heritage. And when she died, she left her family only with the mystery of her birth and the knowledge that they were given their special abilities for a greater reason. Where did this remarkable woman come from? The Anomaly, most likely.

Imagine that the painter who could see the Multiverse married a man with an extremely unique way of perceiving musical sound.

As a child, he discovered his Anomaly-given abilities after storming away from a fight with his mother. While practicing the viola, he ended up playing a particularly loud, ugly note in anger. His bedroom door slammed shut from the burst of sonic energy he'd inadvertently triggered. It came from his feelings being channeled into pure sound, and then pure sound into kinetic energy. Imagine that by adulthood, this man has learned to produce music from anything, even light itself. He plucks at the strings of the cosmos, searching for the right harmonies that will reveal the hidden structures of the universe.

Imagine that the painter who could see the multiverse and the musician who could make music out of light had children. A son and daughter.

Imagine that by 10-years-old, their daughter could feel others’ thoughts and emotions so strongly that she learned to project her form through dreams into other dimensions to help those she heard crying out for help. Now imagine that, due to his uncle’s horrific misuses of his Anomaly-given powers to create entire new universes, the 10-year-old son quite literally faded out of every known universe— cursed to exist only in the hellish Void between worlds. Imagine that his family became so desperate to save him that they risked destroying space and time by using their Anomaly-given abilities to tear through the walls of their universe to try and bring their little boy home.

All of these people exist. They are the Selig-Pastore family, and they are part of what led me to make the decisions I have today.

The Charter is not wrong about the misuse of Anomaly-given powers being incredibly dangerous. They are extremely dangerous, and can make whole universes collapse when the person controlling them does not know how to wield their powers without harming anyone. What the Charter is wrong about is the way they treat the Anomaly and children of the Anomaly as an automatic threat.

I would not be in my current situation if the Charter had chosen to teach beings like the Selig-Pastore family to use their Anomaly-given gifts wisely instead of punishing them, imprisoning them, or killing them. Even the greatest of the Anomaly's powers, and those of Her children, can be used for good. They can coexist within the already established, natural balance of Space and Time.

After tonight, I hope nothing will be the same again. The children of the Anomaly have been hunted down across the Multiverse by the Charter, but no longer!

Tonight, I am going to help my new friends set the children of the Anomaly free from Charter control. Together, we are going to save the boy known as Lex Pastore from the dead space between worlds, and save the last Time Lord.

It’s almost time to go. I only hope I have explained things well enough here.

Whoever you are, know that I am no longer a willing agent of the Charter. I am part of something far greater, and I don't regret it. Even now, I can feel the Anomaly’s creative chaos calling out to me across the universe from the Charter headquarters. Tonight, I am going to answer Her call.

I’m going—


	2. The Crossroads of Fantasy

_[Pete’s World]_

Commander Rose Tyler of Torchwood knew something had gone wrong when she stumbled out of a temporary tear in the walls between worlds (courtesy of her dimension cannon) and found herself in a large warehouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the very same universe she’d started in.

Pulling the flat, palm-sized dimension cannon out of her jacket pocket, she stared in confusion down at the tiny, narrow screen on the side where a set of bright green coordinates was flashing. Everything indicated that she had technically completed a successful jump, but she hadn’t managed to end up in a different universe, or even a different planet. She knew there had been nothing related to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the United States, or anywhere else on Earth in the destination coordinates the cannon had locked onto back at Torchwood – and the coordinates were supposed to be based around the TARDIS’ energy signature. Yet here she was, in a dark, creepy warehouse in the western United States, still in Pete’s World.

_Bugger._

“Sorry, lost your signal there for a minute. Did it work?” Mickey Smith’s voice filtered through the comm device in her ear with a faint crackle. (The small blue earpiece had been designed with her own input by engineers at Torchwood, specifically made to look different from the kind once distributed by Cybus Industries. Rose, Pete Tyler, and Mickey had made sure of that.)

“No, I’m still in the same universe. Bloody cannon just jettisoned me all the way over to New Mexico,” Rose grumbled, placing the cannon carefully in the inner pocket of her purple leather jacket and looking around the warehouse. There was nothing she could see—well not nothing, but nothing obviously alien or Doctor-related— that might have been the cause for her jump getting pulled so far off course. The something that _was_ there was…odd, to say the least.

“Oh my god,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Mickey was quick to respond, always prepared for something to go wrong.

“Nothing dangerous, just strange. I’m in some kind of warehouse, and the only thing stored in here is literally a two-story house. Just a regular old house.” Rose reassured him, listening for any sign of movement from the house or the warehouse around her. No one just stored an entire house in a warehouse like this for no reason, and it was too quiet and dark for her liking.

“A house? Could you repeat that?”

“It’s a house, looks sort of old. Pink roof, nice front porch. It even has, oh wow, it has actual flower pots still hanging from the roof! The flowers look alive and everything…” Rose trailed off just as she was about to go up the front step to the porch to take a closer look at said flowers. It was so dark in the warehouse; she couldn’t understand how anything living could be thriving there.

The moment that her foot touched the front step, a violent shiver went up her spine and she was suddenly overcome with a sense of utter _wrongness_ about the house. She gasped at the cold suddenly seeping through her clothes and into her skin.

“Commander Tyler, we had to reboot our side of the cannon’s location tracking systems, but we have your location locked in now. Since you didn’t travel very far, less energy was used up in the jump. We can use the cannon’s recall to get you right now, if you would prefer.” Alia Hanson’s voice informed her over the comm. Alia was part of Torchwood’s experimental tech department, and often helped run the Torchwood end of Rose’s dimension cannon experiments with Mickey and the rest of their team.

Rose shook her head, slowly backing away from the dark house. The chilling sensation didn’t leave her body though, so she soon wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. “Give me ten minutes. I want to see if I can find out why the jump was sidetracked here.” She said. There had to be something different about this house, something with a similar enough energy signature to the TARDIS to completely derail her dimension jump.

“Affirmative. Delaying dimension cannon recall by ten minutes,” came Alia’s reply.

Mickey was not so calm. “I don’t like this. We’ve never recorded anything like that happening before."

“Mickey, it’s New Mexico, and I’m still in the same universe,” Rose argued, “Besides, aren’t there supposed to be tons of ‘alien sightings’ over here every year? It looks like just a plain old house, but there could be something more to it.” Even as she spoke, her right hand hovered over the Torchwood-issued gun holstered at her waist as she walked around the side of the house.

Thankfully, Alia was on her side. “Tyler is right, we should check this out. The last few jumps, when we managed to actually lock onto the TARDIS’s energy signature, we landed you within a few kilometers of it. Sometimes not even that. This could be important.”

Rose was all too aware of that. After all, she’d been the one hopping all over the multiverse like a madwoman, and the most recent series of jumps had been infuriating. She’d come so close to finding the Doctor and the TARDIS so many times.

“The only issue we might eventually run into is that Area 51 is in that region. Hopefully this warehouse isn’t holding something of theirs, otherwise there will be a lot of unfortunate paperwork to fill out.” Alia said.

“It’ll be fine, I’ll see you in ten minutes.” Impatient now, Rose made sure her tone brokered no room for argument. When there was finally silence from her team at Torchwood, she finished circling the house. There was no movement from inside. No lights on other than the warehouse floodlights far above her, no other sounds made except her own breathing and her quiet footsteps. It was too quiet. Too cold. Not right.

Not right at all.

_Beware!_

The blonde tensed as an unfamiliar voice whispered in her mind, the power and intent behind the words making her feel like she had just walked through a cold spot in a haunted house. That had been clear and advanced telepathy, but from who? Ghosts didn’t exist, the Doctor had told her so, but could they in Pete’s universe? She’d never considered it before. Never had reason to. Rose ran around the front of the house, her eyes rapidly flitting around the dim warehouse. Someone else was in the darkness with her, even if she couldn’t see them yet. Then, just as she was beginning to fear that she had stumbled across another species of invisible, telepathic aliens (she had already encountered two such species on previous dimension jumps,) she spotted a silhouette in the shadows along the wall opposite the front of the house.

“Who are you? Rose said, her hand still hovering over the grip of her holstered gun. There was a crackling noise from the other end of her comm connection, and she belatedly realized that her link back to Torchwood had just gone dead. Someone didn’t want her to be heard. Never a good sign.

A small, humanoid figure stepped forward into a circle of yellow light cast by an ancient looking flood light on the warehouse ceiling. It was a boy, or at least he looked like a human boy. He appeared to be around nine or ten years-old, with dark grey eyes and light blonde hair. He was wearing jeans and a green t-shirt. His feet were bare.

“Can you understand me?” Rose asked, wondering if the boy was from Earth or not. There was something very off about him. He looked dazed and feverish, yet his gaze was unnaturally intense as it bore into her.

He observed her without blinking, making no physical response to Rose’s questions at first. Then, she heard him in her head again, a quiet voice whispering, _Beware, Bad Wolf. They will find you if you stay here much longer. Then they will take you._ Heat flared through Rose’s veins at the two simple words: Bad Wolf. A name for her, the part of her that she often brought to the surface of her mind these days but rarely talked about to anyone. How had this boy possibly known about Bad Wolf?

The chilling sensation she felt from the house behind her lessened slightly as she focused her Bad Wolf abilities on responding telepathically, _Where did you come from, and who is coming for me?_ Pressed for time with only a few minutes left until the dimension cannon recalled her to Torchwood, Rose didn’t bother with telepathic formalities she knew more advanced telepaths would have used. Instead she projected her voice straight into the boy’s mind, just as he had done to her. It was a bit crude, and definitely would have been rude to do to any other telepathic being in the universe. In her defense, the boy had started it, as childish as that sounded. (She also knew she should have tried forming better mental shields as soon as she reconnected to Bad Wolf in Pete’s World, but she didn’t have anyone learn that from. She hoped the Doctor might teach her if she found him again.)

The boy’s eyes widened, and he took a step back in fear. Rose took no pleasure in knowing that she intimidated him, but she soon rationalized it. If the boy knew she her as Bad Wolf, then he should have known that she could easily use his own telepathic techniques against him.

 _Well? Go on,_ Rose pressed into his mind, _What’s with the mysterious warning? Who’s ‘they’? What’s your name?_

 _I’m lost,_ the boy replied, projecting a deep sense of loss and hopelessness into Rose’s mind.

 _Me too. I’m trying to get home,_ Rose sympathized with him.

The boy shook his head. _No, you don’t get it. I want to go home, but home means that everyone will die or leave me alone, and I don’t want that! But you know a way to cheat death, don’t you. You’ve seen it, you’ve remade yourself because of it, and that is why the Charter will hunt you down. Here, and in every world, because you are like me. You are part of the Anomaly. It was nice to meet you, Bad Wolf. My name is Lex._

With his message and warning conveyed, the boy’s form flickered out of existence, leaving Rose confused and a little lost herself. “I don’t understand!” She shouted aloud this time, releasing Bad Wolf’s telepathic powers in her haste to look around frantically for any sign of the boy. The surface-level telepathic connection he had initiated with her suddenly cut off, leaving her feeling drained, cold, and haunted. He was gone.

The chill in the air rushed over her again like an invisible wind, sending goosebumps all up her arms. She should leave. This place was a close to haunted as she had ever seen, and she didn’t fancy finding out who the ‘ghosts’ haunting it were.

At that moment, Rose’s comm reconnected to Torchwood, making her jump. “Commander Tyler, come in! Do you copy?” Alia’s frantic voice came through along with a few bursts of static.

Rose scrambled to answer. “I copy, I copy! I’m okay!”

“We’re trying to recall you, but we’ve lost the connection to the cannon! And what the hell happened to just ten minutes?” Mickey demanded. There was a metallic crashing sound in the background, and Rose winced at the jarring crackle it made over the comm in her ear. It took her moment to comprehend the true magnitude of the problem Mickey had just reported.

“What do you mean you lost connection to the cannon? Just reset it like last time. I’ll wait. We fixed that ages ago, shouldn’t be a problem. Not being able to recall me at exactly ten minutes is hardly all _my_ fault!” She snapped.

“Okay, you’re right, you’re right! But—"

Pete Tyler’s voice came over the comm then, speaking over Mickey. “You went silent for 18 minutes, Rose. We’ve still got a GPS lock on your location, but the cannon recall systems have completely shut down. It could take at least a few hours to figure out what went wrong. If this had to happen, at least it happened while you were still in this universe.”

Rose clenched her hands into fists, reminding herself that it was inappropriate for a commander to start screaming in frustration at the Director of Torchwood, who also happened to be her quasi-alternate universe-not-quite-father. “I know that, Director. Getting stranded is always a possibility, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take to get back to the Doctor. You know as well as I do that we need his help to figure out why the stars are going out. We can’t do it alone. _”_

Pete sighed. “I know. As long as you’re safe for now, just give us some time to try and reconnect your cannon to the controls here.”

“I’m…not so sure about that,” Rose muttered. Her hand flew to her jacket, feeling around for the dimension cannon she had put in the inside pocket. Her breath hitched when her hand slid down the side of her jacket uninterrupted. She hastily unzipped her jacket, checking the pocket itself for the device. It was empty. “The cannon's gone,” she said in utter disbelief.

“What do you mean it’s _gone_?” Pete’s tone was cautious.

“I mean the cannon literally disappeared from my pocket. I know where I put it, but it’s just, it’s gone!” She knew exactly which pocket she’d put the only functioning dimension cannon in this universe, but she proceeded to check the rest of her pockets anyway, and even jogged around the house to make sure she hadn’t accidentally dropped the device without realizing it. (She knew she hadn’t.)

There was nothing to find. The cannon was nowhere in sight. She had a hunch that Lex might have had something to do with it, but she couldn’t figure out how the cannon could have disappeared without her noticing.

“I don’t like this. Whatever pulled you there cut off our communication with you for 18 minutes. I know you well enough to believe that if you say the cannon’s gone missing without your knowledge, then there could be something with you in that warehouse that isn’t friendly. Find an exit and get out of there, now. That’s an order. We will send one of our allies in the States to pick you up in a zeppelin.” Pete said. 

“There is something here with me, and there are no exits, Director. I noticed that earlier.” Rose looked around at the warehouse walls as she spoke, just to make sure she had been correct. It was still true. The warehouse had no doors, windows, or even a loading dock to be seen. She was stuck here without the cannon, without her one chance to go home, to go back to the Doctor. Sure, when she got out of the warehouse, if she got out, she and her team could try to rebuild it from scratch, but some of the components weren’t even from Earth. She didn’t know how they would possibly obtain those items again.

She studied the darkened house again, tall and imposing in front of her. She shivered. Was the warehouse getting colder, or was that just due to her own fear?

 _Time to run, Bad Wolf,_ Lex’s quiet voice slipped through her mind like a phantom echo.

 _What have you done with my cannon?,_ Rose was furious, and it only angered her more when she received no response from the boy.

Chatter over the comm from Torchwood pulled at her attention, but she ignored it for now. Instead, she called up more of Bad Wolf’s power to the forefront of her awareness, enough to heighten and expand her sense into the house.

There were voices whispering unintelligibly somewhere within. “I think I know who took the cannon, and I have to go after it. I don’t have much of a choice, actually.” She spoke over the other Torchwood agents and Pete.

“This is not the time for this. The building you’re in should have five exits. It used to be a bowling alley before it the interior was torn out and the whole place was abandoned, according to local news sources. All of the exits show up on our satellite images of the exterior. Are you sure that you can’t see any of them? Maybe they’re just covered up, or the signs got removed when the whole inside was stripped,” Pete suggested.

“There are no exits visible anywhere. No doors, no windows, nothing. I’m sorry, Pete, but I have to go after the cannon. I have to go.” Rose was certain of this. Regardless of satellite imagery or news sources, the exits were not accessible from the inside. She didn’t want to leave this place yet anyway, not without her cannon. Approaching the house’s front door again, she felt golden fire rush through her limbs, making her hazel eyes and pale skin take on a faint golden glow.

She smiled knowingly. Oh, this rushing, protective warmth never got old, once she had started learning to control it (so she wouldn’t fry her brain to a crisp like the first time.)

It seemed that Bad Wolf agreed with her decision to explore the dark, eerie house. Rose would not be left entirely unprotected or alone; Bad Wolf was always there for her.

“Don’t disobey orders—"

“Tyler, what are you talking ab—”

“Rose, no!”

The voices from Torchwood fought to be heard over the comm, until one by one they faded away. The fear that had been building in Rose since she had realized the cannon had disappeared was now overruled by her determination to retrieve the missing device, and find out why Lex had appeared to warn her about 'them', whoever they were.

 _It’s a mystery worthy of the Doctor_ , Rose thought. Or, rather, it was a mystery for Commander Rose Marion Tyler, the Bad Wolf. Whatever was going on here, she had to trust that she could face it. She didn’t know what Lex had to do with any of it, but she was simply not going to sit around and wait for Torchwood to rescue her.

With a deep breath, the young woman tore her comm out of her ear and clasped it tightly in her right hand. She couldn’t risk putting it in her pocket and having it disappear as well. 

She looked the house’s front door up and down. It didn’t look particularly dangerous or unusual, but Rose knew better than to assume anything yet. Taking a deep breath in, she cautiously reached forward and turned the doorknob.

The door swung open with a creak, revealing a dark hallway. Peeking inside, Rose could see a small painting studio set up in the small bump-out to her left, and a living room to her right. There were stairs leading up to the second floor a short distance down the hall. The rest of the house remained shrouded in darkness.

Exhaling slowly to calm her racing heart, Rose stepped across the threshold.

Within an instant, the entire structure began to shudder violently. She had to quickly grab the door-frame with both hands to keep herself from falling.

She yelped in surprise when the dim yellow flood lights hanging from the warehouse ceiling blew out all at once, showering glass and sparks everywhere. Something began tugging with increasing strength at Rose’s hair and clothes, and she fought it, clinging to the doorway until whatever it was, whoever it was, yanked her forward, throwing her onto the floor. 

The front door slammed shut behind her.

As she got to her hands and knees, she could hear the voices whispering in the darkness around her, along with the distant notes of an unearthly melody. A melody that almost sounded familiar… 

Rose's scream was swallowed by the house as the entire structure vanished from the warehouse in a whirlwind of blinding light, taking her along with it.

~ ~ ~ ~

A few seconds after the house disappeared, a tall humanoid figure appeared in the warehouse via a transmat. They cradled Rose’s dimension cannon in one hand.

“This is Agent 35, reporting in. A foreign entity has entered the Selig-Pastore house through a temporal echo in a parallel universe. I repeat, there is a foreign human entity currently inside the house that should be apprehended as soon as possible. I managed to confiscate her dimensional travel device before she entered the house and could further influence the rapidly destabilizing multiverse inside. This should help us capture her, as she will likely be stuck inside without it. At this time, the house still resists all attempts to place it under a complete spatio-temporal lock. An echo of its physical form was in my current parallel universe for exactly 27 minutes. Permission to continue tracking said foreign entity?” The figure spoke into a black, multi-universal communication device strapped to their wrist.

A tinny, barely audible reply came back, which the agent listened to before replying, “No, I have nothing to report on the last Time Lord. He does not appear to exist in this universe, unlike his current human companion. I only know the foreign entity that just entered the Selig-Pastore house is connected to the both of them somehow.”

Another distant reply.

“No,” Agent 35 shuddered, “I can do this myself, ma’am. I will not fail like my predecessors, I swear. Please don’t throw me in the robot pits! The situation will be under control shortly.”

With that, the agent disappeared silently into the shadows again. He had no time to waste with multiple troublesome assignments to track down: a meddlesome Time Lord and his red-haired human companion, a blonde woman with powers beyond normal human capability, the temporal echoes of a house, and one missing family, starting with a boy named Lex Pastore.


	3. Phantom Time

**_“When a great ship is in harbour and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt._ **

**_But that is not what great ships are built for.”_ **

**_—Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D._ **

* * *

_[The House]_

By the time everything stopped spinning, Rose was fighting her body’s urge throw up from the nausea caused by her impromptu trip. She curled in on herself, one hand pressed over her mouth and the other pressed to her stomach. _She would not throw up on the floor, she would not throw up, she would not… She might… Nope, she would not throw up. She refused to do that. But god, the nausea was overwhelming._

“Oh god,” she whispered, when she could finally speak without possibly vomiting, “Oh my _god_.”

The air was cool and still around her. Unnaturally still. The whispering voices had disappeared.

She sat up, eyes wide and breathing shallow. What had she just done?

The house was creaking every seconds. Shadows shifted and formed strange shapes that Rose could only see out of the corner of her eye. In that unnatural silence, she suddenly heard footsteps travel across the second floor directly above her.

Adrenaline shot through her. She scrambled to her feet and bolted into the darkened living room, desperately searching for a place to hide.

She wasn’t alone in the house. Someone or something else was there.

Rose almost tripped over a throw rug and the coffee table as she moved, despite attempting to stifle every noise she made. Even her breathing sounded too loud in the crushing silence. It didn't help that almost no light came in through the big living room window. She could barely see the street outside through the curtains.

It was nighttime outside, maybe a new moon night. The quiet street and other houses visible through the window also made it quite clear that she was no longer in an empty Santa Fe warehouse. _Interesting,_ she thought, _And potentially problematic, given that I no longer have the dimension cannon._

She could still hear phantom footsteps, now slowly making their way down the stairs behind her.

 _Bloody hell,_ she cursed internally, spinning around and pulling her gun out of the holster at her hip. She was NOT going to run from whoever it was. She was a Torchwood commander, and she’d travelled with the Doctor. She would not let thoughts of phantoms and ghosts scare her away from this place until she’d gotten what she came for: her dimension cannon.

“I am Commander Rose Tyler of Torchwood. Declare yourself!” She called out, carefully aiming her weapon at the doorway she’d just come through.

There was no on there, yet the footsteps grew louder as they moved down the stairs.

“I’m warning you, I’m armed!” She raised her voice even more, desperately hoping that she would receive some kind of expected response.

Instead, the phantom footsteps faded away.

A faint buzzing sound reached her ears then, growing stronger by the second. It was coming from the dining room that was openly connected to the living room. On the table, she saw there were five place settings set. She was sure they had not been there before. There was also with a large, alien-looking device in the middle of them table. It looked like part of a radio that had been forcefully combined with the base of a record player, with three inlaid bronze disks bolted to the top in a neat stack. 

The device itself was humming quietly. Another sound, a low electrical whine, was building somewhere in the kitchen. It sounded like a large machine that was slowly dying. 

Rose peeked into the kitchen from doorway to the dining room. The old white fridge against the far wall was shaking. Well and truly shaking, like something was trapped inside it that was increasingly desperate to get out.

There was also closed door at the back of the kitchen. She prayed it was the house’s back door.

Rose stepped further into the kitchen, gun still raised. The front door was clearly visible down the hall through another doorway. It was too far away though. She wanted out of here as soon as possible, and she didn’t want to go past the stairs if she could help it.

A fast decision had to be made when she noticed white smoke start to creep around the edges of the fridge door. “This cannot be happening right now,” Rose whispered, as she watched the wisps of smoke sink to the linoleum floor and make their way toward her.

The back door was her best option, even though she had to go past the shaking, smoking fridge to get to it.

The device behind her hummed louder. The fridge shook harder. Rose did not like how close its door looked to bursting open.

With that thought, she rushed over to the back door and shoved it open as hard as she could. She promptly fell over its threshold onto a warm, sunlit landing at the top of a flight of stairs, just managing to stop herself from tumbling down them by grabbing onto the railing with one hand. One glance behind her revealed that the door she’d just come through had disappeared entirely. “What the…” Rose mouthed, staring at the small home office that now stood behind her. She straightened, taking in her new surroundings and feeling her heart and stomach drop when she realized they weren’t new surroundings at all.

Somehow she had gone out the back door of the Victorian house and ended up on its second floor landing. And it was sunny now, not the middle of the night.

She could even see the living room from here, and the doorway into the kitchen. The front door looked exactly the same as the last time she’d seen it a few seconds earlier. Distant voices, regular, human voices, could be heard from somewhere downstairs.

All she wanted to do was leave this place, that’s all. Was that too much to ask for? She just wanted to get outside, where she could take stock of her situation better.

“Who are you?”

Rose jumped at the sound of a woman’s voice nearby. She turned to see an exhausted-looking woman leaning against the railing that ran along part of the second floor hallway and down the stairs. Her clothes were paint-stained, and her dirty blonde hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in a week.

When Rose didn’t respond immediately, the woman pushed off the railing and took a step toward her. “Are you one of them?” She demanded with a cold expression on her face.

Rose stared at her in confusion. “I’m…not?” It came as more of a question than she’d intended.

The woman’s expression did not change. “Show me your wrists.” She ordered.

Not knowing what else to do, Rose did as she asked, pulling up her sleeves and baring her wrists. The woman studied them, then Rose’s face. “No, you’re not one of them,” she whispered, “They always wear watches. You, though, you have such strange, tangled lines around you, nothing like them. You’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Rose began to back away from her, a little wary of the woman’s intense stare. “What are you talking about?” She asked.

The woman’s expression fell. Her whole stance seemed to collapse inward a little. “I live here. For better or worse.” She muttered, her gaze drifting to something over Rose’s shoulder.

Rose relaxed slightly, sensing that there was more to this strange woman than there first appeared. “I’m sorry for barging in on you. I don’t know how I got here, but I’ll just leave now, if that’s alright. Sorry.” With that, Rose turned to go down the stairs, eyeing the front door with determination.

She was leaving. Immediately.

“Wait!” The woman said. She rushed forward, stopping at the top of stairs with her hands outstretched imploringly. “Wait, if you’re not one of them, then you must be from Her! Please, you must know who I am! I need your help! My son Lex—"

Rose’s eyes widened at the name, but she never got the chance to hear the end of the woman’s sentence. A small hand suddenly grabbed hers, the one not holding the gun. She jerked away in surprise, almost losing her footing. A young blonde girl had appeared out of nowhere on the stair beside her.

The world dissolved into swirling colors again.

The next thing Rose knew, she was standing in the dining room again. It looked cleaner, and the table was empty. The little girl was still standing next to her, tugging on the purple sleeve of Rose’s jacket impatiently.

Rose stepped away from her. “Who are you? Where did you come from?” She choked out.

“I’m Morgan.” The girl said simply. Her blonde hair was in braided pigtails, and her purple dress seemed to shimmer with some kind of energy Rose couldn’t quite see when she looked at it directly.

Rose took a deep breath. How would the Doctor go about dealing with this strange situation? She had to remain calm, and find out more about the house and its occupants. “Hello Morgan,” she said finally, “I’m Rose. Do you live here?”

The girl smiled and nodded enthusiastically.

“Do you know what’s going on here? Why is the house so…strange?”

The girl's smile became a look of confusion. “Our house isn’t strange,” she said. “It’s part of the Anomaly.”

“The anomaly? What is that?” Rose tried to keep her voice even and calm as she questioned Morgan, but her heartbeat was still racing, and it raced even faster at the girl’s words. Something about this “Anomaly” was tugging at the Bad Wolf part of her mind.

“Not the anomaly. THE Anomaly. She is here.” The girl explained, although Rose didn’t understand her any more than she had before.

Bewildered at whatever she had managed to stumble into this time (jeopardy-friendly alien trouble magnet, that was her) Rose sighed. “I’m sorry, I still don’t understand what you mean,” she said, holstering her gun as she spoke. 

The girl’s eyes drilled into her own. For one second, they almost seemed to burn with golden fire. “She is here,” Morgan repeated, “And _they_ are here. They are coming for the us all.”

“Is it, is it the Charter? Why do they want me?” Rose asked. She hoped that this girl would not give her the same answer Lex had.

Morgan tugged at Rose’s hand until she bent down to be at eye level with the girl. “Because you frighten them.” She whispered. And then she disappeared into thin air, leaving Rose alone in the house once again.

Rose let out a shaky breath, clenching her hands into fists at her sides. She was so tired of receiving elusive half-answers.

The faint buzzing sound was also back, she realized. It was much louder now.

And the phantom footsteps that Rose had very nearly forgotten about in all the excitement of the past few minutes suddenly came from somewhere close behind her. She tensed, hand flying to the grip of her gun again, the power of Bad Wolf rising to the forefront of her mind.

“You should listen to Lex and Morgan,” a man’s voice said, in a quiet, sympathetic tone. “They are correct. You need to run.”

Someone’s hand lightly squeezed her right shoulder as if in consolation, then disappeared. Rose nearly jumped out of her skin at the sensation, whirling around the see who had touched her. She thought she saw a something move by the living room fireplace against the wall to her left, but when she went closer to investigate, there was nothing there. She groaned in exasperation. This house, chock full of time-space anomalies the likes of which Rose and Torchwood combined had not seen or experienced before, was making her paranoid and jumpy.

She shook her head, mentally snarling at herself to focus. She had a dimension cannon to find. And a house to get out of as soon as possible. She’d try the front door this time.

One framed photo above the fireplace caught her attention then. Wherever the house was now enough light came in through windows that she could see the family of four in the picture. One of them was definitely Lex. Another was the strange, exhausted woman Rose had encountered on the second floor landing. A third was the little blond girl that had somehow transported her back to the dining room. Rose didn’t recognize fourth person in the picture, but he appeared to be Lex and Morgan’s father and the partner of the painter woman.

What on earth was so special about this one family, and this one house? Nothing about this was normal, not even by Pete’s World’s Torchwood standards.

Rose rubbed her temples, sparing a moment to wish that everything had been different. She wished Bad Wolf had given her the power to simply get back to her Doctor, wherever he was. She wished she didn’t have to deal with this crazy, stupid house that didn’t seem to want to let her leave. She wished she didn’t feel like she was being watched by invisible eyes, stalked by invisible footsteps. And yet…that spark of Bad Wolf in her mind had encouraged her to enter the house, and hadn’t really reacted to anything inside it so far. That that must mean something. She had to keep going, try to open a few more doors and windows, find out who this family was, and figure out why time and space were warping around every other corner of this house.

She couldn’t sense the warping very strongly, but now that she thought more about the sensation through the lens of the wolf inside her, she was sure she could feel some very strange temporal oddities occurring around her. It was like thousands of possible timelines were on the verge of exploding into existence. And there, at the very edge of her perception, hovered one particular timeline that presented a hopeful possibility.

The TARDIS key on the chain around her neck felt warmer against her skin than it had in over three and a half years. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween!


	4. Ghost Stories Come to Life

**“Fare Forward, travellers!**   
**Not escaping from the past into indifferent lives, or into any future;**   
**You are not the same people who left that station,**   
**Or who will arrive at any terminus…”**   
**— T. S. Eliot**

* * *

_[The TARDIS]_

Donna Noble had been asleep in her nice, comfortable bed, in her nice, cozy room on the TARDIS, in the middle of a rather pleasant dream. To her immense displeasure, she was no longer asleep or able to go back to sleep, no thanks to the bass tones of the cloister bell reverberating through the time ship, and red emergency lighting filling her bedroom.

Growling to herself, Donna threw off her covers, slipped on some shoes that would be good for running in, and stalked out of the room, muttering under her breath about annoying Time Lords and the moral implications of strangling the last one for waking her up. After all, she had just FINALLY gotten to sleep after a long, hard week of running, escaping prison cells, and rescuing refugees in the midst of an alien civil war. 

The emergency lighting and cloister bell persisted as Donna stormed toward the console room. The resident Time Lord—who Donna was still contemplating strangling for this incident, whatever it was—was already standing at the console, frantically flipping levers and turning dials when Donna spotted him.

“What’s going on? Oi, Spaceman! I’m talking to you!” She shouted. Irritation at losing her precious hours of hard-earned sleep radiated off the redhead in waves as she stalked across the grating toward him.

The Doctor barely glanced up at her as he rushed around the console in a whirlwind of brown pinstripes. “I don’t know!” He said, pausing briefly to peer at the monitor in confusion. “I don’t understand. None of this makes sense. The TARDIS just keeps showing me the same coordinates over and over again, and insists that we’re going there right now. When I asked about why, she shocked me! Mildly shocked me, but still, she shocked me. Twice!”

“The TARDIS won’t tell you what’s wrong?" Donna crossed her arms, distinctly unimpressed.

The Doctor finally looked at her fully. In the split second before he managed to mask the fear in his eyes and turn away, Donna realized that something was very wrong. “Where are we going?” She asked, calmer this time as she moved around the console to look at the monitor with him. The symbols flashing rapidly on the screen made little sense to Donna, but she guessed that they must be the coordinates the Doctor had been talking about. 

He didn’t answer her right away, pressing another button on the console and tapping impatiently on the side of the monitor. The TARDIS must have decided to cooperate with him this time, for the visual on the screen changed to show a map of the Earth. Another moment and the image shifted to show a map of the United States. 

“Doctor?” Donna prompted more strongly this time. She still had no idea what was going on.

“See this?” The Doctor jabbed a finger at the coast of northern California. “There’s something going on here in 2016 that the TARDIS just picked up on. It’s a temporal anomaly of some kind.”

Donna stifled an exasperated groan and rubbed at her tired eyes with both hands. She had long given up trying to understand most of how the TARDIS worked, but did the ship have to wake her up for an event that was still a good seven years in her own future? “We’re not anywhere near 2016 or Earth,” she said.

“Exactly.” He sounded rather grim.

“Seriously?” Donna said, lacking any enthusiasm for another adventure at the moment. “I really need sleep, Doctor. Or food, or even better, both of them. Is the universe going to end if I just go get something to eat before we deal with this?" 

Before the Doctor could answer, the TARDIS lurched violently to one side, sending both Donna and the Time Lord crashing to the floor. Then, with a hard thud, the time ship dropped out of the Vortex, her engines grinding as she materialized on some kind of blessedly solid ground. Donna quickly clambered to her feet. “Okay, I get it. No sleep for Donna! I swear—"

The offending Time Lord was quick to interrupt her. “It was the TARDIS! Mostly. She hasn’t exactly cooperated with me lately, but—"

Donna threw her hands up. “And no wonder! I haven’t forgotten that we were having a pleasant time in Colorado a few weeks ago and then look where we got stuck right after! In another bloody—"

“Actually—"

“—civil war! More than once in the last month, may I remind you! Honestly, when it’s not your bad driving, then it’s your ship that never listens to you!” Despite the fact that most of the time the TARDIS landings were not injurious to either of them, the grating in the console room remained an uncomfortable surface to be flung down onto every time the TARDIS or the Doctor was a bit overzealous.

A stream of sparks shot out from the console, almost reaching Donna where she stood a few feet away. “Oi!” She shrieked, quickly backing away from the console and glaring at it. “I never said I disagreed with you about him!” 

The sparks died down, almost reluctantly. The cloister bell continued to toll in the silence that followed. 

~ ~ ~ ~

The Doctor sighed, wondering exactly when Donna had started talking (not telepathically, but still talking) directly to his ship. The TARDIS seemed pretty smug about the whole thing for a sentient time ship that was supposed to be on high alert about a crisis somewhere in 2016 (as if that year needed another crisis added to it.)

 _Must you act like this right now?_ , the Doctor silently demanded of his ship, a touch of exasperation seeping into the projected thought before he could stop it. He already knew the TARDIS wasn't in the mood for an argument, but her response still managed to surprise him. 

A flood of restlessness, irritation and a hint of panic surged across their telepathic bond with the force of a cannon ball. The Time Lord held back a flinch at the forcefulness of it, shocked that the TARDIS was being so blunt. He swiftly gathered his thoughts and pushed right back. _What in Rassilon's name are you trying to do? You KNOW_ _I can’t fix whatever you’ve detected in California until you tell me what it is!_

For a moment, he wondered if the TARDIS was going to remain silent. Then the Doctor caught the faintest impression of two words from her, and they sent an inexplicable spark of electricity through every cell in his body.

_**Eternal Return.** _

His brow furrowed. _I don’t understand. You could have alerted me about this without all this ruckus. Why wake up Donna if you’re not going to tell us what’s wrong? She'll find a way to make me regenerate for this someday, I just know it, and no one here wants to deal with that sort of mess right now!_

The TARDIS gave him the equivalent of a telepathic eye roll, followed by something akin to a pat on the back. She then proceeded to reminded her Time Lord that she was always nice when it really mattered—to her. After all, she was willing to put up with him for centuries, and always took him where he needed to go, even when he didn’t want to listen to her. Which was something he really should do more, and do it often. 

The Doctor didn’t completely agree with all of that, but for now he gave up trying to win that particular argument with his ship that was supposed to listen _to him_ , not the other way around. There were more important things to deal with at the moment anyway. Like find out why the TARDIS was acting so antsy about something in California in 2016. 

The Doctor turned to his red-haired companion, who was impatiently waiting for him to wrap up his mental conversation. “How about you go change and meet me back here in five minutes? I need to finish putting something together, then we’ll be able find out what’s going on.” He said cautiously, hoping that his suggestion wouldn’t set her off again. She left the console room muttering under her breath about anomalies, Time Lords, and whether or not regenerating could turn one into a better driver. All of those things were more than a tad concerning for the remaining Time Lord, so he waited to exit the console room until a full minute had passed following Donna's departure. 

He sincerely hoped the TARDIS hadnt moved his workshop again, though its last location was a bit close to Donna's when she was angry. Not that he thought she would actually do anything to him, and not that he was actually scared of her! He was a Time Lord, he wasn’t scared of one sleep-deprived human.

Well. That was only partially true. He swore he could still feel the slap he’d received once from Rose's—

 _No_ , he was not going to think about anything related to Her right now. He wouldn't, couldn't let himself drown in those thoughts, not today. He had enough to deal with at the moment without adding his own bleeding, broken hearts to the mix. He had a temporal anomaly detector to finish putting together, and a huge anomaly to locate. (Speaking of locating, where had the TARDIS moved his rooms this time? Not being able to find some of them for the third time this month was really getting on his nerves.)

~ ~ ~ ~

When Donna and the Doctor reconvened at the front doors of the TARDIS a few minutes later, the cloister bell was still going off. The redhead was becoming rather good at ignoring it though, and it didn’t seem as loud now anyway. 

Watching the Time Lord shrug on his coat as he walked down the ramp to the front doors, Donna's eyes were drawn to the small rectangular device in his hand. She could see a small screen on the front of it, displaying several oscillating lines. It reminded her a little bit of a heart rate monitor from a hospital, albeit a tiny one. “What’s that?” She asked.

“It’s a timey-wimey detector!” The Doctor announced, looking far too pleased with himself as he handed said detector to his companion.

Donna smiled at his excitement, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at the device’s name. “I thought this thing was destroyed when we went to India a little while back,” she said, turning it over in her hands with curiosity. 

“It was! This is my brand new timey-wimey detector. It goes—”

“—ding when there’s stuff, I know. It still needs a new name.” Donna couldn’t help but give a smile as she handed the detector back to the Doctor. It still amazed her sometimes how the Time Lord could get excited over the smallest things The new device was much smaller and more streamlined than the one she had seen the Doctor use during their memorable adventures in India. This new detector also had a back cover protecting the important detecting bits inside. “Why would you need a new one now?” She asked.

“The name fits it perfectly, Donna. Don’t insult the name. It’s going to help us find our temporal anomaly.” And with that, the Doctor grinned and pushed open the ship’s door with an enthusiastic, “Allons-y!”

Donna shook her head in fond exasperation as she followed him, making sure to carefully close the door behind her. (She really didn’t want to have a repeat of anything that time literal plot bunnies from the planet Mytholos tried to invade the TARDIS the moment the Doctor had opened the door.) 

They had landed in the shadow of an old wooden water tower. There was a small grassy field on one side of the tower, and a long row of small shops and houses one the other. The narrow street in front of them was lined parked cars and passed by a number of cute, seaside shops. Across the street, there lay a beautiful, wild waterfront park with a paths leading down to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. It was early evening here, and the sun was hanging low in the sky, partially hidden by cloud cover.

“So we’re really in California?” Donna looked around with mild curiosity. She didn’t know what she had expected California to look like, but it wasn’t exactly the little cliffside town they had stepped into.

“Yep! Welcome to Mendocino. Quite a small town, it has a population of about 900, give or take.” The Doctor was slowly turning in a circle with his eyes fixed on the screen of his new timey-wimey detector. He was searching for some kind of signal, some indication that there had was a major temporal crisis somewhere in the vicinity

“There are secondary schools back home with more students in them than this entire town,” Donna muttered, more for her benefit than the Doctor’s. He wasn’t paying much attention to her now anyway, too preoccupied with the detector in his hands.

Looking down the road at the row of shops to her right, Donna thought, _‘What could possibly be so bad about a town like this? It probably looks idyllic on a sunny day.'_ Now thought, the sea-breeze was colder that she would have liked, wind continuously rushing up the cliffs and over the town. She tilted her head up, watching as grey storm clouds slowly moved in from the Pacific. “What’s the date here?” She asked.

“2016. March 19th, to be exact. Local time is 5:42pm.” The Doctor said, his eyes never leaving the detector in his hands. He froze suddenly, moving the detector through the air a few inches to his left in the opposite direction of Donna and the row of shops. The device let out a faint ‘ding!’, and the Doctor’s face lit up at the sound. Donna crossed her arms as chilly breeze rushed over them, patiently waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Doctor suddenly narrowed his eyes at the oscillating lines on the detector screen. There it was, the catch that Donna had come to expect from their adventures. From what Donna could tell, the lines on the detector screen seemed to be moving a little more erratically than they had inside the TARDIS. Nothing else looked different, to her at least.

The Doctor silently took his glasses out of his jacket pocket and slipped them on, tilting his head slightly to one side as he stared down at the screen. He seemed rather puzzled.

When he didn’t tell her what he was finding so odd, Donna prodded his shoulder. “You gonna tell me about what we’re looking for anytime soon?”

The Doctor whirled around to face her. “Something is not quite right about the timelines in this town, something so problematic that the TARDIS was able to pick up on it all the way across the universe—and we’re close to its source! Come on, Donna! Adventure awaits!” He exclaimed, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement as he started down the street away from the row of little shops. 

Donna sighed. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be resting much until this newest mystery was solved. She also very much wished that she didn’t feel so drained from running around a war-torn planet for the last week; but once again, she steeled herself and her sore muscles and chased after the Doctor as always. 

She had almost caught up to him when she stumbled over a newspaper lying discarded on the ground. She would have simply grumbled about irresponsible people leaving their trash in places unfortunate souls to trip over, but something on the front page caught her eye. Stooping to pick it up, Donna noticed that it had been printed earlier that week. The headline over the large section of print in the middle of the front page said: “LIGHTS IN THE SKY: REPORTS OF STRANGE LIGHTS SHAPES ACCOMPANY STORMS”. Another section beside that talked about a series of storms coming to Mendocino that week. A glance up at the storm clouds gathering overhead and Donna could certainly believe it. She hoped that she and the Doctor would leave the town before this particular storm hit. 

She ran after him with the paper clutched in one hand. “Doctor,” she called out, “Doctor, wait!” 

He turned to looked back at her, slowing his pace. “What? Did you find something?”

“Read this!” She caught up to him and thrust the paper into his hands. He took it, reading through the front page in a few seconds. Donna watched his face, especially wanting to know what he made of the article about strange lights in the sky. At first he seemed amused by it. Then his slightly smug expression turned to one of concern, and he quickly opened up the newspaper to read the second half of the article on page two. 

He started muttering under his breath too, and Donna could only make out some of what he said. “The Charter? What’s the Charter? Not the Men in Black, that’s a ridiculous name for their organization anyway… No, this can’t be UNIT, isn’t their area…doesn’t sound like Torchwood either, but could ask Jack about it. No, we shouldn’t involve Jack, that could get messy, don’t want another incident. But why would these people just go into houses without…strange noises all over town, odd lights, an approaching storm. Hmmm.”

A cold gust of wind blew in from the sea, making Donna shiver. The storm was definitely getting closer, and the streets were mostly quiet, lined with parked cars but with few people present outside. It was all a bit eerie. 

“It sounds like a classic alien abduction story,” Donna commented, gesturing to the newspaper flapping in the wind in the Doctor’s hands. From her place beside him, she could easily see the second half of the article which talked about supposedly fake organization called the Charter. People belonging to the Charter were going into people’s houses and questioning them without warrant, then disappearing into thin air. Their departures were usually accompanied by a strange buzzing noise.

The Doctor shot Donna a dry, deadpan look. “Classic alien abductions? Really, Donna. After all we’ve been through, that’s the best you can come up with,” he said. 

She rolled her eyes, clarifying what she had actually mean. “I didn’t say it was that, I said it sounded like a classic alien abduction story, except for the breaking into people’s houses and questioning them part. You know, those stories that show up in trashy supermarket tabloids where half the stories are made up anyway. Obviously this isn’t like that. And, obviously, I know first hand now that most aliens don’t actually abduct humans like that anyway.”

The Gallifreyan Time Lord before her arched an eyebrow in disbelief. “I’m going to hold you to that,” he said, “and I’m going to remind that you said that if you ever accuse me of abducting you again.”

Donna laughed a little, mentally brushing away the memories of their tumultuous first meeting. “At least I signed up for it the second time. Now, don’t we have things to investigate? I really don’t want to be outside when that storm hits.” 

“I’m pretty sure I have an umbrella in my pocket somewhere, if you’re so worried.”

“I don’t want to have to use an umbrella at all, Spaceman.”

“But it’s—”

“Oh god, do not say it’s sonic!” Donna said, though the contained smile on her face ruined the effect of the reprimanding tone she had adopted. He matched her expression for a moment, and Donna was glad that in times like these, he didn’t appear to be as sad or lonely as she knew he could be. 

They started down the street again, discussing the newspaper article about reported sightings of alien lights in the sky, the mysterious Charter “men in black”, and odd humming noises all around town. 

“I’m glad I brought the detector with us now, because we may have a rather large anomaly on our hands. Even just based on the timelines I can sense around this town, this particular anomaly is centered somewhere around a place where a lot of things have gone, well, incredibly wrong. That’s putting it mildly too.” The Doctor said.  
  
“Where are we actually going? Just following the detector, or what?” 

“The number of events coming together here is beyond coincidental. What are the odds that the TARDIS would pick up on an anomaly here, and the one newspaper you happen to find on the street talks about lights in the sky, and a strange humming noise all around town, all in relation to a particular house? I bet you we’re going to end up looking for that house or something similar, actually. They might not know what’s going on, but even regular people in this town know something is wrong here.” He showed Donna a section of the newspaper article where a woman spoke about a strange house in town, and a strange family. She seemed to imply that their young son was either no longer living there, or had died recently. Donna wondered why the boy's disappearance seemed to be such a big secret.

Soon they were following the street into one of the town's older neighborhoods. Donna swore she saw someone in a black suit trailing her and the Doctor at least two separate times. Whenever she turned to get a good look at them, whoever they were had already vanished. The Doctor was quite sure he saw a man in a black overcoat standing at a street corner up ahead, talking into a device on his wrist, but the man disappeared down a side street the moment the Time Lord focused on him. 

Then the sound started. No, not the sound, The Sound. The one that the interviewees in the newspaper article had talked about. It was an extremely specific combination of sonic frequencies that grated at the eardrums of all who heard it, inescapable and irritating to the extreme. _Like the worst case of human tinnitus ever,_ the Doctor quickly decided, _and possibly a very dangerous form of it._ The ringing, buzzing noise droned on and on, making his eardrums throb and ache, and providing an intensely distracting static sensation in his mind. The longer the Doctor was forced to endure this, the more he began to seriously consider potential nefarious intents behind it. This painful experience clearly wasn't coming from pure, simple sound waves. No, there was definitely else underneath the frequencies that didn't belong there, something that...something...

Where had he been going with that thought? He couldn't remember, and that fact sent a cold burst of fear down his spine. 

The Sound was as the people of Mendocino had described in the local paper. No one could continue to think much of anything while hearing it. The Time Lord tried covering his ears with his hands at the same time as Donna, until they both realized that didn’t help block out the noise whatsoever.

Now the Doctor understood why that woman in the newspaper had sounded so desperate. If he had to live with this high pitched buzzing in his head all the time, it would drive him completely barmy too.

The Sound stopped so abruptly that he almost didn't believe his ears until Donna whispered in relief, "Thank god!" He had to agree.

It was only a short distance further up the street that the timey-wimey detector started dinging rapidly. The Doctor turned a dial on the side to stop the racket, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and studying the readout on the small screen. After a moment, he exclaimed, “Ha! I was right! Whatever we’re looking for, it’s right…Right here.” 

Donna looked up at the house they’d stopped in front of. It was a Victorian-style two-story dwelling, with a covered front porch and flower pots hanging from the roof. The wooden railing and support columns lining the porch had various purely ornamental elements to them, with pink paint highlighting a few decorative engraved patterns and the roof against the backdrop of green and white that made up most of the house’s exterior. Overall, it was not a bad looking house, although Donna wouldn’t have chosen green and pink for its primary colors if it had belonged to her.

The driveway was empty, and the mailbox at the curb stuffed to the point of overflowing. All the lights in the house were off, all the curtains drawn. A chill went up Donna’s spine. There was something very odd about this place, something that not even the warm evening could change. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on what made her feel that way.

“Did you feel that too? The chill in the air?” The Doctor asked , holding out a hand in front of him as if he was reaching out to something only he could see. 

Donna crossed her arms. “It’s just a little colder than I expected.” She replied shortly. 

The Doctor did not dismiss the cold sensation settling over his limbs so easily. He dropped the detector into one of the bigger-on-the-inside pockets of his coat and exchanged it for his sonic screwdriver. “I don’t think it’s not a natural phenomenon we’re feeling right now. And that should be nearly impossible anyway, given your human senses. You can’t see or feel timelines, but somehow you’re all able to feel this anomaly. Whatever this is, it has to be either very strong or very big to affect you so much. It’s like— I know, it’s like that feeling you humans always talk about when you’re near a really, really old building, or a dark forest at night. You lot always say you feel like there are spirits or ghosts watching you, right? Ghosts don’t really exist, or course, but that feeling explains this phenomenon well enough.”

What on earth was he going on about? “I’ve never been one to be scared off by ghost stories. And it’s just a house!” Donna insisted, flippantly gesturing at the structure in question.

The Doctor had the gall the grin at her. “Oh, I know you’re not one to be scared by a few ghost stories, Donna! But you can tell something is wrong here, and I’m telling you you’re exactly right for thinking that. I’m just not sure why it feels that way.”

Donna looked back at the house, shivering once more as an intense chill slowly spread upward and outward from her spine into her limbs. Perhaps the Doctor was onto something.

He was, in fact, proved right a minute later when he raised his sonic screwdriver to scan the house for temporal anomalies. A transparent barrier shimmered into existence around the entire property, and the buzzing sound in the air increased in volume. 

“What’s that?” Donna had to raise her voice to be heard.

The silver-hued barrier was as thin as a soap bubble, its surface rippling gently. The Doctor contemplated it for a second before shrugging. “Energy field of some kind,” he said. He and Donna watched it undulate silently in the air for a few moments. Then Doctor took the timey-wimey detector out of his coat pocket again and turned it on.

Donna recognized his current expression as the ‘I don’t know what’s going on yet but it seems wrong, so I’m going to figure it out how to fix it no matter what’ face. She was glad to see that face, but she also dreaded its appearance. It meant their situation wasn’t going to be an easy fix, like always.

“OH! Look at this!” The Doctor said, showing her the detector’s screen. Multiple lines were moving across it, oscillating so rapidly and erratically that she could barely tell them apart. 

“What’s it mean?” She asked. 

“These little lines here represent timelines, in a very, very simplified sense. It’s really much more complicated, but anyway, you saw what they were supposed to look like earlier, in the TARDIS. Usually a bit calmer. Right here, right now, the natural timelines are incredibly active. Much more active than almost any individual’s should be, and so in flux that any more temporal energy here and we could be standing in the middle of a great big dangerous fissure in space-time.”

“So this house and whoever is in it, that’s definitely the temporal anomaly we were looking for,” Donna summed up. She received a tense nod in response. The two of them fell silent. Donna still couldn’t make out what was still creeping her out about this place. Maybe it was because everything around it was simultaneously too still, and too loud with that obnoxious buzzing sound. Maybe it was because there was a big storm approaching the town. Whatever it was, it made Donna’s skin prickle uncomfortably. 

Without warning, every light in the house suddenly flared to full brightness, then began to dim ever so slowly. 

In a flash of light so fast that Donna’s eyes almost missed it, the house and everything else on the property disappeared, leaving behind a vacant property lot that looked very much abandoned and overgrown. After staring at the space where the house had been for a moment in utter shock, Donna looked over at the Doctor. He was also staring at the empty lot, eyebrows raised in surprise. 

“What on earth was that?” Donna was the first to break the silence.

The Doctor shook his head. “I, ah, well, I’m not exactly sure. This is a very strange temporal anomaly, that much I can tell you. I’ll need to run a few tests back at the TARDIS to know more.”

~ ~ ~ ~

When they got back to the TARDIS, there was a folded piece of paper lying in front of the door. The Doctor picked it up, turning it over in his hands with some trepidation. After a moment, he opened it and read it aloud to Donna, a dark expression passing over on his face. “To The Doctor of Gallifrey and Donna Noble of Earth: You have trespassed on Charter property. Leave immediately, and no further actions will be taken against you. Continuing to impede our organization’s business will result in such actions being taken as necessary and without hesitation.” A black logo, a teardrop shape suspended over a wide concave base, was printed at the bottom of the paper along with the words “THE CHARTER”.

“What did we do to piss off these people? Have we ever even met them?” Donna demanded. 

The Doctor fidgeted with the edges of the note. “Not that I know of. Never heard of them in my life, actually. But they clearly know about us,” he said eventually, running two fingers over the unfamiliar logo. He didn’t like where this particular adventure was leading them; accidental life-and-death sort of incidents were par for course in his life, but despite some mistakes in the past, he did truly hate it when someone directly threatened his companions. (Especially after the war.) 

While Donna got something to eat from the TARDIS kitchen, the Doctor searched through his ship’s archives. Frustratingly, he and the TARDIS were only able to locate a single mention of the Charter. It was in a document buried in the oldest section of the archived memory banks, dating all the way back to Gallifrey. He didn’t remember when or why he had archived this particular document, but he didn’t stop to dwell on it now.

The document was an excerpt from a much larger piece related to the Laws of Time, and briefly mentioned the Charter in a footnote. The Charter claimed to base their purpose around combating the “negative effects” of something called they called Anomaly, which “spread creative chaos”. The footnote also mentioned that after some investigation into the “Anomaly” and possible dangers of the Charter’s methods (whatever those were,) no such Anomaly was ever found to exist. Thus, the old Time Lords of Gallifrey considered the Charter a low-level threat because it didn’t have any ability to interfere with the Laws of Time. In fact, the Doctor surmised, they seemed to be a sort of cult, and a somewhat insane cult at that.

The Doctor found this last piece of information both quite helpful and unhelpful. Nothing good came from insane cults, and whatever this Charter had become over the centuries, it certainly sounded more threatening now. They knew about him and Donna, where both of them were from, and about the TARDIS. This situation was becoming a little more concerning the longer it went on, and the Doctor soon began to wonder exactly what else the Charter knew about him. Information about him and his life could be quite dangerous, if it fell into the wrong hands. That singular record of the Charter from Gallifrey was older than the Doctor himself by at least 5,000 years. Where had they been hiding all this time? Had they been involved in the Time War? How long had they known about him, specifically?

The Time Lord paced around the console room muttering to himself as he tried to piece together what he knew about the Charter thus far. To his growing irritation, he kept coming back to the same handful of questions that he simply couldn’t answer. “It makes no sense. Where did they come from? What do they do, and why was the TARDIS drawn to this incident if they’ve been around for such a long time? What happened here that’s so important?” He groaned in frustration, hands tugging at his hair as he flopped down onto the jump seat. He mentally ran through the list of things he knew for certain about the Charter and the time anomaly in Mendocino. 

The TARDIS had picked up such a large temporal anomaly that she had triggered a mauve alert (something that he was positive that Donna was going to make him regenerate for, someday soon.)

Then the TARDIS had taken them to Mendocino, California on March 19, 2016.

The Charter and their supposed “agents” had been mentioned multiple times in an article in the local newspaper, and their presence seemed to centered around one particular family and house in town. (The Doctor was glad he had shoved that newspaper into his coat pocket after Donna had given it to him; it might come in handy again soon.)

The temporal anomaly the TARDIS had sensed seemed to have originated from an old Victorian house—no doubt the same house from the article. 

The Doctor’s brand new timey-wimey detector had definitely locked onto something strange going on with the timelines around the house, but then the entire device went a little haywire the closer he and Donna had gotten to the actual location. 

Then there was that note from the Charter, with a threatening message personally addressed to him and Donna. That was unpleasant, and meant that there was a possible threat to his and Donna’s lives out there in the universe somewhere that the Doctor was only now becoming aware of. Leaving Donna at home while he investigated this further was, unfortunately, starting to look like it wouldn’t be a great option either. This Charter could potentially still find her. Whatever they was now, whatever they had become since the Time Lords had investigated them ages ago, they could be more substantial now than anyone else had known about or foreseen. 

This left the Doctor with a great big stinking problem: He had no concrete idea of where to begin with this particular temporal anomaly, nor did he know where to start looking for the Charter. Perhaps the Shadow Proclamation had dealt with the Charter at some point, but he really didn’t want to involve the Proclamation unless it was as a last resort. 

A quiet beep from the TARDIS console jolted the Doctor out of his thoughts. He quickly hopped off the jump seat, pushing his glasses up his nose as he made his way over to the monitor. “Alright old girl, what have you got for me?” He asked, leaning forward over the console slightly as he studied the results of the sonic’s scan of the house. He had to do a double take as he read through the TARDIS’ data analysis, because he’d seen a lot of supposedly impossible things in his long life, but what his ship was trying to tell him this time really took the cake. 

“Find out anything interesting while I was getting breakfast?” Donna’s voice called out as she re-entered the console room with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of buttered toast in the other.

“The TARDIS sure thinks so.” The Doctor said hesitantly. He was simultaneously reading through the rest of the TARDIS’ analysis of the site of the strange temporal anomaly and carrying on aN intense telepathic conversation with his ship.

 _Do you think this is funny? What you’re telling me happened at that house, it’s impossible. That many tears in space-time would destroy multiple universes at once, which obviously, it did not._ His tone may have been a little too blunt and impatient, but only because the impossibility being presented to him was of the multiple universe ending variety. He knew first-hand how impossible it was to rip holes between parallel universes without consequences.

 ** _Not impossible. The Charter._** The TARDIS insisted.

Donna was getting impatient. “Oi, dumbo! You going to explain what you found, or are you just going to stand there staring at the console for eternity?” 

He explained as best he could. “The TARDIS analyzed my scans of the property after the house disappeared. The anomaly we’ve come across appears to have both happened and not happened very recently, which is why the TARDIS couldn’t tell us much about what happened. It an odd kind of paradox, because you can’t really exist and not exist at the same time. The thing is, whatever the event was, it isn’t acting like a proper paradox. There are traces of so many different kinds of energy that shouldn’t exist here at all, along with multiple fractured timelines that I can sense but only just, like I’m picking up distant echoes of the real thing.”

Donna finished off her toast and tea, and rubbed a hand over her tired eyes, trying to follow exactly what the Doctor was saying. “So that Charter had something to do with all of this, and whatever went wrong really did happen, but also it doesn’t exist at all. Right, okay then.” She sighed. 

“Oh, wait, wait, wait! Ghost stories!” The Doctor exclaimed, coming to a sudden, brilliant realization. ( _Oh, some of the puzzle pieces were finally coming together now!_ ) He quickly started inputting new coordinates into the console controls as he explained, “It’s like I said earlier when we suddenly felt that cold spot outside the house. Some beings naturally perceptive more of reality than others, and sometimes, they’re able to sense things like temporal anomalies. Things like temporary connections between their present and some other time, or places where the walls between worlds are slightly thinner than normal. I wasn’t really expecting you to be able to sense this one, but then you did. Both of us felt like something was wrong with that house before it disappeared, and we were right! The house only looked like it was there, but it wasn’t. It really disappeared on March 17th at 7:06pm!”

Donna was more than a little confused by the rapid-fire explanation. “What? Why 7:06pm?” She asked.

“That’s the exact moment that the anomaly formed somewhere in that house. We were just two days too late to see it happen, because the TARDIS has fail-safes built in prevent her getting close to dangerous anomalies like this one. Forgot about those. We might have to get around them somehow…” The Doctor trailed off, staring intently at the console.

Donna coughed pointedly, drawing his attention back to the relative present. 

“Right, sorry,” he said, “Anyway, today, we managed to stumble across a temporal aftershock of the house, the way it would have been had the anomaly not formed. And I should probably point out now that a lot of these things should, theoretically, be impossible.”

“Of course temporal aftershocks exist,” Donna sighed, setting her tea down on the floor next to the jump seat. “Is that where we’re going now? Back two days, to see what happened?”

With a final pull of a level, the time rotor started up, the ship quaked and groaned, and the Time Lord at the console grinned upon seeing Donna’s wary but understanding expression. “That is exactly what we’re going to do. The TARDIS probably won’t like this though, so you might want to hold onto something.” He said

“Wouldn’t be you if you weren’t sending us headlong into the next adventure every day now, would it?” Donna quipped back, but she quickly followed his suggestion and grabbed onto the nearest handrail. 

The time rotor soon slowed to a halt, and the TARDIS materialized with a loud screech, a few unhappy bangs, and an abnormally heavy ‘thud’. The Doctor strode to the doors and pulled them open with a flourish. “Let’s find out who our ghosts are, shall we? Hopefully we should be able to see exactly what happened in Mendocino on the night of March 17, 2016. It’s 6:55pm right now, so we shouldn’t have to wait for long.” He said.

Stepping outside, the two of them found themselves standing on the side of a narrow side street that ran parallel to Mendocino’s Main Street. It was not quite sunset, and the sky was clear. The TARDIS had materialized about half a block away, but they could clearly see the old Victorian house down the street. 

This time, the lights were on, and two compact cars were parked in the driveway along one side of the house. Donna and the Doctor ventured a little closer to get a better look.

Donna found that she could hear voices quite easily inside the house; it sounded like people were arguing about something, but she couldn’t quite make out what it was. Whatever the subject was, it was causing the Doctor to fidget nervously beside her, but it wasn’t enough to make him run. Donna didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing, given what had happened to the house the last time they were there.

The living room curtains were still closed, but at least three silhouettes could be seen moving behind it.

At 7:02pm, small signs began to indicate that something out of the ordinary was happening within the house. Every light inside began to dim. That otherworldly buzzing sound from before filled the night air, pulsating and grating against the Doctor and Donna’s eardrums in a way that had less to do with how it actually sounded, and more to do with what the sound itself was doing to space and time. 

The horrible sound grew and grew in strength until it was unbearable enough that Donna had to cover her ears with her hands in a futile attempt to block it out. A glance at the Doctor told Donna that if she thought the sound was slowly becoming unbearable to her ears, then he had passed that threshold long ago. 

On his part, the Time Lord was wholly unprepared for this assault, every one of his senses agonized by the sound. Even his finely-tuned time sense decided to go haywire in the face of it. He quickly realized that the pain in his head was not only from him, but from the TARDIS as well. The noise was badly affecting her too—and that really took some power to actually hurt a TARDIS.

The lights in the house had started rapidly flickering on and off as the Doctor sank to his knees. His hands were pressed over his ears now, but that didn’t help at all.

Donna, only slightly less affected by the sound, quickly knelt down beside him. “Doctor, what’s wrong?” 

He shook his head slightly in response, eyes squeezed shut and fingers gripping his hair as he tried to block out the sound in every way he knew how. “Just keep watching the house! We need to find out what happened.” He spoke through gritted teeth, shame flooding through him at being blindsided so completely by mere sonic energy. (So much for being a mighty Time Lord with superior biology!) 

They didn’t have to wait long for the main event sensed by the TARDIS to happen. At 7:05pm, every single light in the house flared, shining far brighter than any normal light bulb could. Donna thought she could almost feel the electricity in the house skyrocket.

Then the entire house went dark all at once, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass.

“Oh no,” the Doctor whispered. The sound coming from the house was reaching peak intensity. It must be 7:06pm. 

He didn’t need his time sense to tell him something catastrophic was happening to the walls of his universe, and it would happen no matter what he did now. The walls were cracking, the Void was opening, and it was all starting to feel horribly familiar. He heard a scream that might have come from him as something ripped through time and space inside the house, leaving gaping holes so large and unstable that not one or two, but hundreds of new, impossible worlds burst into existence in that single moment. The temporal aftershocks of this moment burst outward from the house in like a tidal wave , and the Doctor was sure he and Donna were about to be consumed by it in a matter of seconds. He couldn’t move, couldn’t stop it, and really, he was the worst friend imaginable, about to get both of them killed— 

Barely a second passed after the Doctor had this thought before the excruciating sound abruptly went silent. 

Donna saw a flash of movement in front of the house, just the hint of that same shimmering barrier forming around the property, before the entire house collapsed in on itself like an imploding star. Everything, the house, the driveway, both cars, the mailbox full of mail, and the wrought-iron street lamp by the curb all disappeared in less than an instant. The only thing left was a small open field of tall grasses and wildflowers that looked like it had been there for years.

The Doctor finally raised his head, lowering his trembling hands from his ears. “Did you see it?” He asked. 

Donna answered in the affirmative, still staring with wide eyes at the empty property in front of them. “It was like, I don’t know how to describe it,” she started, “Every light in the house turned on so bright all of the sudden, and then everything seemed to freeze. That energy thing came up around the property, and the house just collapsed in on itself, disappearing with everything else. Sorry, I hope I’m making sense. How’s your head?” 

“I’m fine.” The Doctor said shortly, getting to his feet. A quick scan from the sonic screwdriver told him that the energy signatures of the time anomaly that had been present in the Mendocino house was much stronger than the last time he and Donna had been there. Not only that, but the temporal aftershocks from the house’s disappearance were still actively originating from somewhere on Earth. The source seemed to be fading rapidly though. They would have to move fast if they wanted to catch up with it.

A man walking his dog turned the corner and began walking down the street toward Donna and the Doctor. He gave no indication of having seen or heard anything unusual. He simply smiled and said hello to the two of them as he passed, continuing on his merry way. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that an entire old house in his neighborhood had vanished barely a minute before.

“What was all that? The anomaly forming?” Donna spoke up then, still casting worried glances at the Doctor. (She didn’t believe for a moment that he was fine.)

He huffed, purposefully keeping his gaze trained on the readout on his sonic screwdriver. “I’ve heard a good number of theories about the use of specific sound resonances, that is sonic energy, to create time fissures or possibly damage the walls between universes, but I’ve never considered that such things could actually happen in a small town in California! There shouldn’t be any kind of technology like that here and now.” 

“I’m still concerned about what that sound did to you!” Donna exclaimed, shoving an accusatory finger in his face. She was not willing to let this incident go yet, no matter how much he wished she would.  
  
“I’m really fine,” he insisted, carefully moving out of range of her hand. 

“Yeah, pull the other one!” Donna scoffed, lowering her hand with a roll of her eyes when she realized he was backing away from her and shooting her hand cautious looks.

“Honestly, I’m fine now. I don’t know why the house disappeared, but we are going to find out.” The Doctor forced their conversation to an end when he turned on his heel and stalked back into the TARDIS. He could practically feel Donna’s gaze drilling into his back the entire time.

Donna crossed her arms as she followed him, wondering why she bothered to ask him personal questions anymore. He rarely gave a straight answer about himself, even now.

Of course, she really knew why she kept asking him things she knew he didn’t like to answer. She did care about the Time Lord’s well being after all, something he so often didn’t do for himself. She was his friend, one of the precious few that he allowed to get somewhat close to him and all his enthusiastic, adventurous, self-preservation-lacking glory. 

And of course, they were always going to be the Doctor and Donna Noble, friends and partners in crime, constant investigators into universal timey-wimey strangeness. 

The Charter wouldn’t know what hit them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it begins...
> 
> Also thank you to everyone who has reviewed and left kudos! Your support is much appreciated!


	5. The Night Market

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. Hope you enjoy!  
> Thank you to everyone who left reviews and/or kudos!

_[The House]_

Rose had tried to force open both the front and back doors of the house. When that hadn’t worked, she’d tried to open or break through the windows, including those on the second floor. Those attempts had failed too. Now, she was really starting to run out of possible escape routes.  
  
A desperate cry of all-consuming frustration finally flung itself from her lungs when her 17th attempt to break the living room window failed. The heavy stone cutting block she’d found on the kitchen counter lay innocently on the floor, having bounced off the bloody unbreakable window and dropped to the ground like the pitiful, useless hunk of stone it was.

Rose slammed her hands against the offending window, clenching her jaw and wishing she had never set foot in this house at all. She pressed her forehead to the cool glass, watching the rain that had started an hour earlier soak the parched, empty street. It was so dark and stormy outside that she could barely see past the end of the block.  
  
“Why won’t you let me out? I know you must be alive in some way, or be controlled by something. What do you want from me?” She whispered, not sure whether she was speaking to the house or its owners. “Please, just do something, tell me what you want, I just want out. I want to go back to my life. I have so many things to do, an’ people, well, a person, a Time Lord, to find. I have to find him, do you understand? You really want to return home, Lex? Well so do I, but I still have to find my home, in another bloody universe. I promise, me and the Doctor, we’ll come back and help you with whatever this is. Just. Let. Me. Out. _Please_.”  
  
Only silence met her plea. Rose scoffed (at herself, at the house, at everything) as she pulled away from the window, hot, angry tears welling in her eyes. She sniffed, hurriedly brushing them away with the back of her hand. “Course nothing happened,” she chided herself. “You’re just talking to an empty house.”  
  
A low rumble came from the kitchen, as if the house itself were protesting. Rose slowly turned to look in the kitchen’s direction. One of the overhead lights had been turned on. She was sure every light in the house had refused to work the last time she’d attempted to tear apart every room in search of another way out.  
  
A faint crackle of electricity sounded out. A strange sliver of white light began stretching across the floor from somewhere in the kitchen, reaching all the way into the dining room.  
  
Rose started toward the source of the light with her heart pounding in her chest. She came to a stop in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, staring with wide eyes at the sight that greeted her. The fridge door was open a few inches, and blinding white light was spilling out. The light seemed to dance across everything it touched, rippling and warping like the disturbed surface of a pond.  
  
She ventured closer, taking slow, measured steps and glancing warily around her as she crossed the kitchen. She was still alone, as far as she could tell. Even the phantom footsteps had disappeared. She started to wrap her fingers around the handle on the fridge door, but quickly jerked back when a small zap of electricity shot up through her fingers.  
  
She bit her lower lip, contemplating the handle for a moment longer. Then her eyes fell on her black boots. Boots with sturdy rubber soles.

_Ah. That should work._

And with that, she carefully toed open the door the rest of the way.  
  
At first, the white light was utterly blinding. Rose was forced to squint, shielding her eyes with her left hand. She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision. She could make out a few shapes if she squinted hard enough, making out a few distant impressions of bipedal beings dwarfed by massive columns that rose rising from an indistinguishable ground. Then came the sounds, so sudden and loud in their arrival that Rose jumped in surprised when they reached her eardrums that had grown too accustomed to eerie silence and haunting footsteps. Laughter, both alien and human, reached her first, then shouting, bells ringing merrily, and the deep rumble of heavy machinery hard at work. The columns just barely visible in the light rapidly faded away and were replaced by smaller, darker silhouettes that became clearer the longer Rose stared at them.  
  
Like the house it stood in, the fridge wasn’t just a fridge. Ground-level exterior doors opened onto second-floor landings, windows that were climbed through led to the inside of the kitchen cupboards, and the dryer contained a swirling vortex of blue energy that led…elsewhere, probably.  
  
Of course there would be a portal in the fridge.  
  
Rose took one last look around the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room beyond. Still silent and empty.  
  
She faced the portal again. A distant melody drifted out from its ethers for a moment, almost too faint to hear properly. The melody seemed to beckon her forward, making the Wolf inside her raise its head and turn its ears in the music’s direction. A low, reassuring pulse resonated deep with Rose’s mind, like the rumbling growl of a wolf separated from her pack that had finally picked up a familiar scent. This was her way out.

Rose let the corners of her mouth turn up slightly. Wherever this portal went, she would go too.  
  
Newly determined, she stepped into the fridge and surrendered to the portal’s pull. Lights and colors and sound immediately assaulted her senses, wrapping around her in a dizzying vortex that squeezed and stretched, and finally spat her out into a dark, humid alleyway.  
  
She stumbled over to the nearest wall, bracing herself against it with one hand as she caught her breath. Her vision was still swimming from her trip. She blinked hard, relieved when she finally started to see just one of everything instead of three. The rough bricks making up the building beside her felt sticky with accumulated moisture.  
  
Once she felt grounded enough to stand upright—something that took a lot longer now than it did on dimension jumps because she hadn’t eaten in what felt like two days straight—she was able to take in surroundings fully. There was a crowded cobblestone street at the end of the alley ahead of her, packed with stalls, carts, and beings from every corner of the universe. Rose’s blood ran cold, even as the sight gave her a new spark of hope.  
  
She wasn’t on Earth.  
  
That could be potentially problematic, since the portal she’d come through had disappeared. Still, getting out of that house had to count for something. She had long ago dedicated herself to returning to her original universe, and the only way out of this mess was through.  
  
Rose started forward, sticking to the shadows as she approached the mouth of the alley. The air was thick with smoke, humidity, and the scents of alien foods. Her hand brushed the grip of her gun, and despite not wanting to actually have to use it, she was glad to have it with her now. She had yet to establish whether this world was human-friendly or not.  
  
Peeking out at the crowds milling around on the street, Rose saw that she was in some kind of market. Colorful flags and banners stretched between the buildings lining the road, fluttering over patrons heads. It was nighttime here, wherever here was, and the sky was filled with dark, roiling storm clouds. Every few seconds, pale green lightning flashed within the clouds without even the faintest rumble of distant thunder. _‘How strange,’_ Rose thought to herself. What kind of world could have that much lightning without thunder? Maybe the atmosphere was just very different from Earth’s, or something like that.  
  
She turned her gaze back to the street, observing the multitude of stalls lining it for as far as her eyes could see. There were aliens with wings, aliens with scales, aliens with tusks and fur, aliens that crawled or slithered, and aliens with more limbs that Rose cared to count. These were all similar to things she had seen before on dimension jumps, and while traveling with the Doctor. She had grown more accustomed over time to being the only human present on such occasions, so it was more of a shock to see what looked like a few other humans from Earth perusing vendors’ stalls in the market.  
  
Rose’s gaze followed the movements of one such being, a figure in a long red cloak with the hood drawn up, partially concealing his face from her view. The human (or humanoid alien) was inspecting the pottery wares of a vendor across the street and a few stalls to Rose’s right.  
  
The cloaked person picked up a small figurine of a bird-like creature, with its fiery red painted wings outstretched, and dropped two small silver rings into the vendor’s waiting hand. The cloaked figure then pocketed their purchase and left the stall.  
  
Rose inhaled sharply and stepped further back into the shadows when the dim yellow street lights illuminated the face of an elderly man beneath the cloak's hood. His vibrant blue eyes fixed intently on Rose for only a moment, but the intensity in his gaze took her by surprise. The hum of the Wolf at the back of her mind rose in pitch, not quite alarmed, but not entirely welcoming either. Then the man looked away, and Rose relaxed slightly. She watched him make his way down the street away from her, wondering why he had noticed her out of the hundreds of other beings at the market.  
  
Maybe she should find that out, actually.  
  
No sooner had the thought entered her mind than she was darting into the street, jostling her way through the crowd after the elderly man. She lost sight of his bright red cloak a few times, and no doubt offended a few species in the process of finding it again, but she stayed the course as best she could. Aliens chittered, hummed, cackled and babbled in so many languages around her that it was a bit disorienting to hear them spoken over each other from every direction. The market was so much bigger than she’d thought too, stretching for city block after city block. She still had no real idea of where she was, only that the beings around her thankfully didn’t seem to care about her species.  
  
She jogged past nightclub entrances, fortune tellers’ stalls, and multiple food vendors selling everything from what looked like bright pink chips to fried batter shaped into the most intricate, artistic designs Rose had ever seen produced from food.

She was just about to follow the man in the red cloak into a local bar when a massive web of lightning split the stormy sky into a thousand pieces. Everyone on the street ducked at once, letting out fearful shrieks and gasps.

Rose dropped to her knees, following everyone else’s example and not caring how bruising the rough cobblestones would be. She hunched over and covered her ears on instinct just in time. 

The deafening boom of thunder that followed shook buildings, rattled windows, and made the very ground beneath Rose’s feet tremble violently. Her breath caught in her throat as the sound wave slammed through her body. Her heartbeat stuttered for a single, terrifying moment. Then the thunder faded away, leaving her ears ringing and her heart pounding in her chest. She straightened, scrambling to her feet and looked to those around her, hoping she might be able to get a sense of what had just happened (and why) based on their reactions. Everyone around her was in the process of re-orienting themselves, standing up, helping their neighbors gather their wares, and muttering anxiously to each other.  
  
No vendor called out to passing shoppers. Instead, most of them began to swiftly close their stalls, haphazardly packing away their wares in their hurry. Previously happy customers were rushing to find their friends or family members and vacate the street. Everyone kept throwing wary glances at the sky. 

Rose stepped out of the way of a group of shoppers rushing down the street and took her gun out of its holster, switching the safety off as she turned her gaze to the sky. The dark clouds still seethed like water just about to boil, but now, the green lightning was concentrated around one particular section of sky to her left.  
  
A small dark shape suddenly pierced through the cloud layer, visible only for the few seconds it was lit from behind by a flash of lightning. Then the shape disappeared again. Someone screamed.  
  
An earsplitting siren began wailing all over town, making Rose and many others jump. She had to fight to stand her ground when most of the patrons still out in the street surged toward the storefronts, pushing through open doors or racing down alleys in utter panic. Only a few beings remained outside along with Rose, racing to man what looked like well-practiced defensive positions.  
  
Rose retreated to the end of a nearby alley and crouched behind a pile of wooden crates. What on earth had caused that burst of thunder and lighting? And why had it scared a massive, diverse crowd of aliens into running for their lives?  
  
She nearly jumped out her skin when a cool humanoid hand landed on her shoulder. She jerked away, whirling around ready to unleash the full extent of her hand-to-hand combat training on whoever had tried to grab her. She only stopped short when she saw the man in the red cloak standing behind her. His face was half hidden in shadow, but he held himself with the confidence of a man used to hearing the sirens warning of an oncoming battle.  
  
“It is not safe for you here!” He said, raising his gravelly voice in order to be heard over the sirens.  
  
“You can speak English!” Rose exclaimed, too shocked to reply with anything else. He had an accent that she didn’t quite recognize, but it was still a form of English all the same.   
  
The man nodded impatiently. “Yes. You need to go! They are coming. Please! It is almost too late!” He implored, stepping to one side and gesturing down the alley behind him.  
  
“What? Oh no, I can take care of myself, mate.” She twitched the gun in her right hand to draw his attention to it.  
  
Underneath his cloak, she could see the hint of a scowl. “You do not know them like we do,” he snarled, advancing on her with more speed and grace than she’d expected from a man of his apparent age. “You have not lived through a Charter raid. I can see it in your eyes. You do not know what you speak of. You may never escape them once they decide you are theirs.”  
  
“The Charter is here?” Rose asked, tension flooding her body. The Wolf’s hackles rose in her mind at the name.  
  
“Yes,” the man nodded grimly. “The Charter is here. The Fog usually keeps them out, but today they must be determined to find one of their fugitives. You are clearly new to the Night Market if you do not know such things. Maybe you’re even the one they’re looking for this time. Maybe not. Either way, you do not know them like we do. You will only get in our way, or get yourself killed or captured. Leave here now, and find a place to hide.” He gave Rose a slight push down the alley when she remained frozen in place.  
  
She dug her heels in, in every sense of the phrase. “Wait, wait, what is the Charter? Just tell me that, at least.” She said. (She’d just go find some other alley to hide in and observe whatever was happening here.)  
  
The man hesitated, considering Rose for a moment. Then he finally answered, “They are the universe’s worst shadow, imposing their vision of ‘perfect order’ where they see none, and crushing those who oppose them. Those who do, like us, well, we’re the lucky ones. I’ve heard stories though, about what they do to their prisoners. Mind-control, endless labor in the worst robot pits in the universe, and worse.”  
  
Rose gaped at him. She didn’t understand the meaning behind everything he said, but she shuddered at the thought of being mind-controlled for the rest of her life.   
  
“Now, please, go,” he urged. “And for the Anomaly’s sake and yours, I hope that you are not the one they’re after!”  
  
Rose gave a slight nod, still processing all that he had told her about the Charter. Then she took off running.  
  
“Watch the sky!” The man shouted after her.  
  
“Thanks!” Rose yelled over her shoulder. Then she turned her gaze upward once more. Immediately, her heart sank. There were many, many more dark shapes hovering at the edge of the cloud layer than before, each of them perfectly still. Jet black silhouettes at odds with the organic movements of the clouds behind them. And they were everywhere. 

Wherever lightning flashed within the clouds, another silhouette of a Charter fight craft was revealed. They had managed to surround the city by air, practically in the blink of an eye. Rose had never considered the possibility that if the Charter really did exist, and they really were after her, that they might have military power on their side.  
  
All at once, white hot lines of energy burst into existence between each Charter craft, linking each ship together to form a giant geodesic dome. A transparent barrier instantly rippled into being the second the last link finished forming, filling in the dome’s empty spaces. It was a three-dimensional barricade, blocking anyone from leaving or entering the city on foot or by flight.  
  
“Oh my god,” Rose whispered, slowing to a halt as she observed the colossal energetic structure that now trapped her and hundred of other beings inside the city. For the first time, she began to understand why everyone she’d met who had spoken of the Charter did so with fearful or hatred in their voices. The Charter was evidently quite formidable.  
  
Right then and there, with the newly-acquired knowledge that she was entering a fray of unknown proportions between forces far bigger and older than herself, Rose Tyler swore that she would find a way to stop the Charter, hopefully with the Doctor’s help once she found him, but on her own until that day. She didn’t know exactly what the Charter did, but any shadow organization that spread that much fear across the universe couldn’t possibly be a good thing.  
  
She was preoccupied enough with those thoughts that when she took off running again in search of a place to hide, Rose didn’t notice the two lithe, humanoid figures racing along the rooftops after her, tracking her every move from above.


End file.
